By Mark Bushnell quotes Amy Trubek
Rutland Herald/Times Argus (Sunday Magazine section)
October 25, 2003
For the first few pages the world seems familiar enough. You
can quickly be
deceived that you are in familiar surroundings as you read
these
descriptions of Vermont food traditions of the early 20th
century. Only a
few details mark the scenes as dated - perhaps the people
singing "Put on
Your Old Gray Bonnet" at the sugar-on-snow party or the
two women discussing
how best to play a bridge hand at the church chicken pie
supper.
Then, several pages later, the writer is discussing how to
make such dishes
as apple pan dowdy, spiced currant relish and soused pig's
feet, and you are
suddenly in terra incognito.
When she unearthed the historic documents on Vermont's
eating habits,
cultural anthropologist Amy Trubek was struck by the
intersections of the
familiar and the strange. She stumbled upon the papers,
which were from the
Vermont Writers' Project, while researching another topic at
the Library of
Congress. The writers' project was part of a national effort
to record the
country's food traditions. The book, the result of the
project, was to be
called "America Eats."
But just before the book was to be published, American
entered World War II,
which in turn ended Depression-era jobs programs like the
national writers'
project. A section on food traditions of the Midwest was
eventually
published. Other than that, though, the work's only audience
has been
researchers like Trubek.
"I found many interesting snippets about what people
were like," she says.
"It just gives you this tiny little snapshot, just a
soupcon, but it's
enough to make you wonder what was going on."
As Trubek talks, she sounds like she is discussing some
mysterious
civilization - not our state a mere 65 years ago.
"For most of history, people cooked responsively,"
says Trubek, who is on
leave from the New England Culinary Institute while on a
W.K. Kellogg
Foundation fellowship. "People cooked what was around
them."
So in that sense, Vermonters in the late 1930s were more
closely tied to
their ancient ancestors than they would be to us.
"We are in this weird modern moment because we decide
what we want to cook,"
says Trubek - we don't just make do with what is at hand.
"Now we ask: Do I
want burritos tonight or do I want some Thai dish? It's
totally bizarre."
It might seem strange to us to use almost exclusively local
ingredients to
concoct such unfamiliar dishes as pickled butternuts, baked
Indian pudding,
or squash flower relish, but says Trubek, from an historical
perspective "we
are the weird ones."
Trubek shared a copy of the papers with her friend cookbook
writer Marialisa
Calta, who lives in Calais. Together, they pitched the idea
of printing the
writings as a book, but publishers so far have been cool to
the idea. That
hasn't stopped them from thinking the papers are
significant.
"It is as close to time travel as you can get,"
says Calta. "You can
actually taste what people long ago tasted."
But the food writings and the recipes accompanying them give
readers more
than a chance to experience a long-gone flavor.
"When you spend time reading about food, you get a
real-time understanding
of how people spent their days," says Calta. And not
just any people, but
the ones most often ignored in history books: women.
Many of the recipes revolved around a large piece of meat
being cooked for
much of the day, which suggests to Calta that the women
lived very
home-centered lives. They had to be around to stoke the fire
and check the
food. Then, when it was done, they would serve the meat in a
way that
strangely reminded Calta of Indian cuisine. To accompany the
meat, they
would offer an array of pickled foods, just as Indian cooks
might offer a
variety of chutneys.
Some of the recipes sound about as exotic to modern ears as
those
chutney-like relishes. Take spiced beef, which was eaten
cold for breakfast
or supper. The recipe says: "A round of beef is salted
down for a week, then
washed well and black pepper and mace rubbed in; then put
into a stone
stewpan along with three or four onions, sliced and fried, a
few cloves;
covered with water and baked for five hours."
The recipes are remarkably short and devoid of detail. As
Beatrice Vaughan
wrote in her 1963 book, "Yankee Hill-Country
Cooking," recipes were
typically "written in almost telegraphic form by
experienced cooks who
assumed that other housewives could fill in any gaps as to
ingredients and
methods."
Similarly, Cora Moore, who wrote the recipes for the Vermont
Writers'
Project, assumed you already knew how to salt down beef or
make a piecrust.
The assumption, says Calta, was that "if you couldn't,
then what were you
doing reading a cookbook?" The secrets of the kitchen
were passed down from
one generation of women to another.
That, of course, is no longer true in many American
households. "Nowadays
everything needs explanation," says Calta, the cookbook
author. "You would
think by now we would know more, at least about
technique."
But for various societal reasons, women no longer can or
choose to devote so
much time to cooking.
Another lost tradition was once common in Barre. In her
portion of the
Vermont project, writer Mari Tomasi documents how some
Italian women in that
city, to help their families during hard times, turned their
homes into mini
restaurants. Tomasi's descriptions make the food sound like
the best meal in
town: "The array of appetizers leaves the (first-time
visitor) agape.
Paper-thin slices of prosciutto, a ham processed in pepper
and spices.
Large, red wafers of tasty salami. Pickled veal. Celery.
Ripe olives, the
dark succulent meats falling away easily from their
pits..." You get the
idea.
The women, often the widows of granite workers, cooked first
for neighbors,
then the friends of neighbors. Word spread and eventually
the general public
was knocking at the door. By Tomasi's count, about 50
families were offering
home-cooked meals, dubbed "Italian feeds," during
the late '30s or early
'40s.
Though most of these families probably arrived in the United
States decades
earlier and considered themselves quite American, Trubek
isn't surprised to
see them maintain their Italian cuisine.
"Food practices are the last to change in
assimilating," she explains.
"Language is the first to go, dress often goes soon
after, but food is the
stickiest."
We might cling tenaciously to food traditions, but they can
still slip away,
and with them go a piece of our past.
"We are so interested in celebrating Vermont's
agricultural heritage,"
Trubek says, "but often we don't understand what it was
really like. But
this can really help us understand what people were doing
with the land."
Mark Bushnell's history column is a regular feature in
Vermont Sunday
Magazine.
© 2003 Rutland Herald and Times Argus